The following table of alcohol laws of the United States provides an overview of alcohol-related laws by state throughout the US. This list is not intended to provide a breakdown of such laws by local jurisdiction within a state; see that state's alcohol laws page for more detailed information.
As of July 1988, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had a minimum purchase age of 21, with some grandfather clauses. Prior to 1988, the minimum purchase age varied by jurisdiction. After Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in July 1984, states not in compliance had a portion of their federal highway funding withheld. South Dakota and Wyoming were the final two states to comply, in mid-1988.
Unlike on the mainland, the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have a minimum purchase age of 18. The minimum purchase age is 21 in the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.
U.S. military reservations are exempt under federal law from state, county and locally enacted alcohol beverage laws. Class Six stores in a Base Exchange facility, an Officers' and/or NCO clubs as well as other military commissaries which are located on a military reservation may sell and serve alcohol beverages at anytime during their prescribed hours of operation to authorized patrons¹.
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, alcohol, laws, united, states and/or state:
“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain great fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man’s making which trample on these ideas, are null and void—wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.”
—Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932)
“I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband’s dinners.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)